It all started with a sad day, a walk of hope.

I wrote about it here.

It ended with a bumper crop of passion fruit, not a bad outcome, at all.

That passion fruit I planted is back, with a vengeance.

The thing is, it moved.

It moved underneath the fence, to the sunnier, southern side.

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My neighbor’s side.

Ordinarily, this would be a bad thing.

Ordinarily, this would mean my passion fruit would fall victim to that emblem of suburban weaponry, the weedeater. What neighbor would tolerate their suburban fence and yard being overwhelmed by a fast-growing, nondescript, tendril-y monster of a vine?

Fortunately, my neighbor.

As it turns out, she not only tolerates this invader, she has adopted it with, shall we say, a passion?

Over the course of several weeks, she carefully weeded out the narrow strip of soil between the fence and the driveway, dug out the gravelly old soil, supplemented the strip with topsoil, and festooned the fence with a series of quirky, found trellises, all without disturbing the slumbering roots of the wayward passion fruit vines.

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As the new growth has emerged, she sprays the vines with a Dawn dishwashing concoction to keep away the bugs.

She tries to rescue the passionflower vine babies that erupt from the cracks in the middle of the driveway.

Then she ordered packets of FIVE NEW types of passion fruit vines to grow along the rest of the fence. And more fences.

Oh, yeah. This is getting out of hand.

Fortunately for us, the idea of being overwhomped with a kudzu of passionflower vines is not only tolerable to us, it makes a faraway expression come over our faces as we dreamily contemplate the things we could make out of passionflower fruit: ice cream, sorbet, and cheesecake, jams and butters, syrups and cordials.

Yes, we are going to share the fruit. It is a folie à deux, a shared madness.

The new varieties are Blue, Tumbo, Lilikoi, Sweet Calabash, and Giant Granadilla. Keep your fingers crossed I can get these puppies to germinate.

If you share our crazy.

–Daisy